Stylus Magazine

Positing that a career is announced as a trajectory and that at the line moment of the curve, a g-spot hung indefinite in the air suspended at the maximum speed, the following quotation is made in sound: "Toronto-based minimal techno composer Tomas Jirku's highpoint was Variants on Alien8. Since then, he has produced some interesting records, but nothing as dark, deep, and haunting as the exploration of minimal techno found on his first album. Entropy returns to this darker, slower sound, but with a significantly different agenda:"

--and here we interrupt this agenda, as a pause, as a contrast; the dark sounds, why do we consider them as such, serious, art, with force? Was it because of a palette found in Jirku's suit, glittering in the light, namely that suit of water he named sequins? It would become necessary to count each sequin and to consider the glitter from one against the other, to see if one echoes the other and if indeed they are the same or if the palette was able to sustain itself. It would be a dull manouevre and perhaps it is this which the sound itself brings to an ear, i.e. what the sound carries within itself: this dullness of the sequin. And yet, here in Entropy, we find a name that captures exactly that which was criticized of Jirku: a specific musical entropy found glittering. (When water was under consideration as object of contemplation its subjectivity flowed to a pool, an eddy, backwater, it became stagnant, some would say). And now that entropy is under consideration it operates not as a proper name (although it must by necessity) but also farther, always farther, by its phonic necessity, a sonic impulse, as subject, as subject to its own laws (the laws of entropy, which are paradox, as all systems slow to entropy and entropy is the moment of the mark of energy) and as subject to a treatment of entropy. Can entropy send itself into its own orbit?

"...but with a significantly different agenda:"

1. The loss of information—the decontextualised reinterpretation of Jamaican dancehall rhythms through a discordant combination of toybox drum sounds and intricately dispersed echoes, howls, and dub sounds. [& are those toybox sounds a remainder of an entropic lack of critical sonic momentum, or the considered juxtaposition of careful sound contra cheap sound?]

2. The trace of potential—what could be achieved with the acquired elements is disseminated in a flurry of directions, resounding with metallic intensity. [in the toybox there lies the choking dagger]

3. No returns—each direction absolves its responsibility through chaos: chaos adds zero-sum game, and the dark warbling low-end responds against aqua cultures of the night. [a dancehall immersed underwater & in flames]

A return, telephasic, to Variants, a fraction of a complete cycle explored, leaving open all future moves of Tomas Jirku to be prophesized. gut. minimalism. "This is an album to be digested slowly." (& for those curious this is an album of slow, minimalised beats on a theme of dancehall with echoes of a loss, of warehouse space, of echo memory).

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